1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to an automated call distribution system that routes calls between a network and call center sites.
2. Description of the Related Art
Most call or contact centers serve commercial institutions including financial institutions. Typically, in a call center serving a financial institution, when a call is received from a customer, the call is handled based on an availability of an agent at a call center site. An attempt is made to handle the calls rapidly to reduce wait times and agent cycle times. There is concerted effort to make the wait times in the order of twenty seconds average speed of answer and two to three minutes of talk time.
In a virtual call center environment, call center sites may be located in multiple locations across the world, operating as a single entity. Most call center sites are built on a model of very high cycle time with large volume of calls. In a medium call center environment, however, where call durations may be on average fifteen to twenty minutes each, agents talking with the customers for longer times while some customers may be waiting for ten minutes to half an hour to talk to a next available agent, a non uniform distribution of calls occurs when routing calls across multiple call center sites. In other words, a call routing system may send a large volume of calls to one call center site and cycle back to send a large volume of calls to another call center site. As a result, the agents at various call center sites may not be efficiently utilized to answer calls by the call routing system. For example, overloading of one call center site may occur while underutilization of another call center site occurs. This may cause various problems including loss of efficiency, higher costs, and customer dissatisfaction.
The present invention is directed to overcoming or at least reducing one or more of the problems set forth above.